The Twenty-third Psalm

It surprised me, initially, that this poem appeared in our textbook. The Bible and all other religious texts are typically ignored, in order not to offend anyone. Then again, there are other religious poems within this book that I didn't blink an eye at because they weren't part of a religion-founding, larger book. This poem is really the same. After considering this, I found myself pleased that the psalm made an appearance. Honestly, it is really beautiful, and, besides, if works like the Qur'an and the Bible are not canonical, I obviously don't know what that term means.

So, a couple things that I noticed about Psalm 23. First off, the NI to L (Norton Introduction to Literature) labelled authorship of this Psalm "Anonymous," when every Bible I have seen attributes it unquestionably to King David. Second, they took this translation from the King James translation of the Bible, which is interesting. King James has easily the most lyric translation of the Bible that I have ever read, but also the most questionable. Most Christians I know have a distaste for this translation because it was arguably the most subjected to interpretation. I like it, personally, and think that all editions of the Bible have been majorly subjected to interpretation. Thirdly, I have discovered that point one and two were in the footnote at the bottom of the page, which made me feel a lot less like a detective boss.

As for the actual poetry itself, it is very rhythmic. The conjunction of the independent clauses does much to create this, and I wish I understood more about stressed and unstressed syllables because I feel like it uses this, too, but couldn't tell you how. It was also interesting to me that the terms for God (he, thou, thy) were not capitalized unless they headed one of the first clauses. It makes it less formal, to me, but I'm interested in how others would interpret this. One last thing: in the original Hebrew, this psalm is an acrostic poem, the verses of which begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I wish I could read Hebrew, because I feel like this would be a cool effect and, obviously, it does not translate to the English version. Which brings to mind the major downfall of this psalm: just how much is lost in translation.